Drawn from Paradise: The Natural History, Art and Discovery of the Birds of Paradise with Rare Archival Art by Attenborough David & Fuller Errol

Author:Attenborough, David & Fuller, Errol [Attenborough, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

Elliot’s Bird of Paradise. Hand-coloured lithograph by Joseph Wolf and Joseph Smit from G. D. Elliot’s Monograph of the Paradiseidae (1873).

Elliot’s Bird of Paradise. Hand-coloured lithograph by William Hart and John Gould from Gould’s Birds of New Guinea (1875–88).

Stresemann’s remarks had curious repercussions. Not only was the form dismissed from lists of accepted species and ignored by later researchers, but the original specimen was deemed of such little consequence that experts at the Natural History Museum in London tossed it into a box alongside other apparently worthless specimens with the intention that it should be destroyed. Its survival is down to a stroke of good fortune. No-one at the museum ever got round to carrying the box to the dump! It lay with the trash for many years until a curator by the name of Michael Walters re-located it and saved it for posterity. Whatever its actual status, thanks to Mr Walters this historic relic is now safely under lock and key in the museum’s collection of type specimens.

If the form is indeed a hybrid, there is a more likely pairing than the one selected by Stresemann. Affinity with Sicklebills is evident, so the Black might remain under suspicion, but its partner could have been a Long-tailed Paradigalla (Paradigalla carunculata), one of the species that lacks ornamental plumage. There is a rather distinctive structure to the tail that is reminiscent of a paradigalla, and there are also small facial wattles that might link it to that species.

And there the matter rests. Elliot’s Bird of Paradise may be a species that is now extinct. It may be a bird with a very limited range awaiting rediscovery in some unexplored corner of New Guinea. Or it may be a hybrid. But it is probably not the hybrid that Stresemann believed it to be.

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